Motel 6 vs Hotel Tugu

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During past seasons when our family has done a lot of traveling in the U.S., we often have stayed in the budget motel chain, Motel 6.  With rooms starting at $39.99 and 1,100 hotels that dot the U.S. map, you can almost always find an affordable room to stay for the night.

You also know what you can expect.  The rooms are generally clean.  The shower pressure is just enough to wash your body but not enough to invigorate the senses.  The rooms, the lobby, the whole place is very utilitarian and simple. But at 60 bucks or so I’m not complaining.  You stay at a Motel 6 because you can rest your weary traveler’s body for the night and because it’s cheap.

 

Contrast the Motel 6 experience with where my wife and I stayed this past weekend for a get-away. The Hotel Tugu Malang is a wonderful, soulful hotel which overlooks a giant lotus pond and monument that commemorates Indonesian’s struggle for independence and rests in an old Dutch, tree-shaded part of town.  The hotel was built by art lovers and there are vast caverns of art and antiques to explore throughout the property.  The lobby has plenty of places to sit comfortably and read, accompanied by the sounds of a gentle fountain.  Gardens galore.  An upstairs tea room offers free Indonesian refreshments every afternoon and you can sip your tea while overlooking the lotus pond from the veranda.  The rooms are cute and quaint, accented with teak wood, and the decorators very much paid attention to detail.   The staff wears traditional Indonesian batik clothing.  The hotel is connected to a delicious Italian restaurant and to get there you can stroll through a long “tunnel of love” which is draped with colorful tapestries.

 

After 24 hours at the Hotel Tugu Malang our spirits and bodies were refreshed for another season.  Usually after a night at the Motel 6, and a strong cup of coffee, we are ready to hit the road again.

 

While we were at the Tugu, and I was enjoying some soul reflecting time, I looked around the lush gardens and comfortable lobbies and thought how much my inner life does not reflect the spaciousness of this place but more the utilitarian-ness of a Motel 6.  Instead of gazing at beauty, like which can be found so richly in my Savior’s eyes, I opt for a quick quiet time out of the door and on to my day.

 

My soul feels most of the time as spacious as a Motel 6 lobby.  I want it to more resemble the gentle gardens of the Hotel Tugu lobby, vibrant yet restful, but to get there I have to down shift my soul.  Usually my to-do list sets the pace for my day and I don’t have time for silly things like nature walks.  What about worship just for the sake of worship?  A little poetry and not just e-mails all the time?  What do I need to do to renovate my Motel 6 lobby soul into the spaciousness of the Tugu?

 

Which would you enjoy more, the Motel 6 or the Tugu?  Me too.

 

Eruptions and Disruptions

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Sukarto smiles widely with his remaining good teeth and motions for us to enter his home.  It’s a small and simple structure, hunkered down in the ash-enriched soil of Mt. Bromo.

 

His wife Sukarni also gives our team a warm welcome and quickly disappears to make refreshments for her guests.   Even as we start chatting we can hear the grumblings of Mt. Bromo, eruptions that sound like ocean waves and rumbling thunder at the same time.  The active crater is about a mile from their house and you can see it clearly from their front yard.

 

Sukarto, like many Tenggerese people in this area, farms onions, cabbages and potatoes.   To help supplement his meager income he also works as a tour guide, bringing his horse down to the “sea of sand” every day, hoisting up tourists onto his small horse and guiding them from the parking area right up to the steps of the smoking crater.

 

Normally Mt. Bromo, a popular tourist destination in East Java, shoots out a manageable amount of sulfuric steam continually.  But since late November, it has been erupting in a more dangerous way, belching out grey ash that has blanketed the community and blown all the way to Surabaya, a few hours’ drive away.

 

There are no more tourists for Sukarto to make his living.  And even worse, his garden is covered in two feet of ash.  Life is already hard for these people, and this slow-folding disaster has made it much worse.

 

The house is built short, Sukarto tells us, because of the strong winds that whip through the fields.  If it were taller, it would be easier for the wind to knock it down.  When I stand upright in the home there is about four inches of clearance between my head and the ceiling.

 

Sukarni comes out with a tray of sweet tea and fried bananas.  We gratefully partake and once again I marvel at the hospitality of Indonesians even in difficult circumstances.  Our team of seven, made up from different organizations in Malang, gather some facts about their situation and try to offer comfort.

 

The main thing that Sukarto asks for is food staples.  The government has brought water but he and his fellow villagers are getting short on food supplies . Normally in a natural disaster there would be NGO’s crawling all over the place and offering such aid, but this has been a different type of disaster, slowly building and out of the spotlight of the media.  Nothing dramatic but ash raining down and no one has died.

 

 

We ask permission to pray for him and his wife.  They seem grateful for the prayers and disappointed when we tell them we need start driving back down this mountain range to our homes in Malang, about 3.5 hours away.  Why are we such in hurry…it’s not even raining yet?  We apologize we must be going and take our leave.

 

They walk us to their front yard, all covered by this eerie grey snow storm, and heartily wave us goodbye.

 

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Dear Faith Activating Friends,

 

What an experience our survey team had this last Tuesday in the Bromo region of East Java.  The reason we came is to see what resources our “Disaster Response Team” of Malang could bring to bear on this unfolding disaster.  Our feel afterwards was that the main need is food and maybe some man power to help clean out houses.   If you would like to help with giving toward this village, and one other that we visited, see the info at the bottom of this report.

 

To see pictures of this trip, please click here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=273248&id=707338821&l=ec10a463e3

 

 

 

 

The first village we came to, called Weringin Anom, is much further down the mountain than Sukarto’s.  It lies along a river and was inundated by a flood caused by the eruptions.  Bromo’s thick ash, combined with mud slides, has chocked the rivers with hundreds of thousands of rocks and newly formed dams from all the debris.  Those dams break when the pressure builds and the rivers overflow their banks.

 

Where the river normally bends it just kept going and filled half of the 77 houses of there with about three feet of muddy water.  Through they were warned by friends upstream through cell phone calls, they didn’t have enough time to salvage their belongings.  Our host told us that about half the people have decided to stay and rebuild and the other half are looking for other places.  For the ones who stay there is fear it could happen again as Bromo continues to erupt every day.

 

For our host we gave some money to help repair some damage to pipes in his village.  He was grateful and is awaiting our next response.

 

If you would like to be part of that response, email me at mikeo@gomail.asia and I can send you the information on how to give, either online or by check.

 

Thanks for your prayers and support for the people affected by the Mt. Bromo eruptions.